NETFLIX’S week of reckoning should not be dismissed as a passing row over one clip. It is a window into how a global platform has normalised sexual and gender ideology for children while sidelining the ordinary goods of family life: fatherhood, chastity and monogamy.
The flashpoint was a resurfaced scene from Dead End: Paranormal Park, a children’s animation whose teen lead is written as transgender. Netflix’s own page lists it in the Kids shelf. Elon Musk then told his 227million followers on X to ‘cancel Netflix for the health of your kids’, and the backlash was big enough for business desks to cover the stock move.
This was not a one-off mistake. It is a pattern. Netflix’s own editorial site Tudum pushes a Trans Day of Visibility slate, ‘Celebrate Trans Day of Visibility with These 16 Movies and Shows’, which explicitly curates titles for discovery. In preschool, Netflix Jr’s Ridley Jones introduced the non-binary character Fred and was hailed in the press as a first for the age group. In family adventure, Netflix’s Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous wrote two teen girls into a same-sex relationship that advocacy outlets openly celebrated, for example GLAAD’s feature. The 2025 sequel series Jurassic World: Chaos Theory is listed in the Kids catalogue too, complete with the same gang returning. And at the ‘younger-kids-with-a-message’ end of the spectrum, Netflix’s remake of The Baby-Sitters Club placed a trans child storyline in Episode 4 and worked with GLAAD on it, as the creators told Vanity Fair.
If anyone tells you the algorithm simply ‘shows what you like’, do not be naive. Netflix says plainly that its home screen and Top 10 rows are engineered to drive discovery. Read the company’s own help page on recommendations and its Top 10 explainer. Its engineers have publicly described how they rank and personalise the rows you actually see. In other words, what appears first on your child’s profile is not a neutral mirror. It is a product, tuned by people you will never meet, trained on data you cannot inspect, and wrapped in an aura of popularity by charts your child cannot audit.
The company’s commissioning logic makes the bias worse. Netflix measures and trumpets identity tallies but has no comparable metric for ‘intact married family at the centre’ or ‘positive fatherhood’. See the Inclusion hub and the USC Annenberg partnership summary. What platforms measure, they multiply. When marriage and faithful fatherhood are invisible in the dashboard, they will keep disappearing on the screen. That matters for children, because the evidence base shows married parents are, on average, more stable than cohabiting ones and that stability links to better outcomes.
Those who say ‘this is just diversity for adults’ have not been paying attention to what the platform serves teenagers either. Netflix’s breakout teen properties treat adolescent sex as therapy or comedy. Sex Education was praised for raunchy candour from the start and for a preachy, message-heavy final run, for example the Telegraph’s Season Four review. Big Mouth, an animation about pubescent children, is repeatedly lauded for being ‘delightfully vulgar’ and ‘filthy’. See the Atlantic’s description and its follow-up on its explicit tone. Defenders call it ‘adult animation’, but the show is about children and is marketed as insight into puberty, so it bleeds into teen culture whether parents like it or not.
And yes, we should remember Cuties. In 2020 Netflix was forced to apologise for ‘inappropriate artwork’ sexualising the 11-year-old cast in its marketing, after a global furore. Read Vanity Fair on the apology and Deadline‘s coverage. Prosecutors in Texas went further and obtained a grand jury indictment. In 2023, the Fifth Circuit blocked the case, finding bad faith by the prosecutor. However you judge the film’s intentions, the episode shows how far Netflix will push into sexualised territory involving minors and how damaging the mis-steps can be.
Nor is sexual risk the only harm story. When Netflix released ‘13 Reasons Why’, mental health bodies and researchers warned about suicide contagion in teens, and an NIH-supported study found a near 29 per cent rise in US youth suicides the month after launch. Samaritans urged caution and later welcomed Netflix’s edits to the most graphic scene.
What to do now: First, stop pretending Netflix is a neutral library. It is an editor and a promoter and it has chosen a very specific catechism for children. Second, act with your agency. If you share Musk’s conclusion, cancel Netflix and tell them why. If you stay, lock the house down. Netflix explains how to set maturity ratings and block titles by name, though these tools are buried in settings rather than visible inside Kids profiles. See parental controls overview and ‘block by title’ instructions. Third, insist that here in Britain the platform respects child-first defaults in the Kids shelf. Netflix already uses BBFC ratings across its UK catalogue under an extended agreement, so there is no excuse for lax placement and soft tags in Kids. Ofcom’s new regime will bring streamers closer to TV standards. Parents and civil society should make plain that sexual identity catechesis has no place in programming labelled for the young; see Ofcom’s Media Act implementation page.
The positive case must be said out loud. Marriage, properly understood, is the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman. It shelters children, binds mothers and fathers, and offers boys and girls the ordinary miracle of a dad and a mum. Netflix loves to count everything except what counts for children. If its dashboards never count the portrayal of faithful marriage and fatherhood as a good to be admired, do not be surprised when those stories vanish. Families are entitled to say No.
